By Rich Tehrani
Single mode LTE is has gone from evangelism mode to commercial shipments according to Altair Semiconductor as they showed me the new Verizon seven-inch Android Ellipsis Tablet which retails for $249 with no contract and only $10/month as part of your shared plan. This is the first LTE-only product according to Brendan Schaffer who tells me that by using a single-mode device you can save up to $100.
This is big news for the company – you may recall how last year I reported about how they were evangelizing the single-mode LTE concept and was discussing network certifications.
Having passed this major milestone of enabling multiple devices in the US, the IoT is now a ripe area for the company where they think they will be able to lower costs over mulitimode solutions.
I mentioned that in many of my conversations with carriers they say they love the M2M space because it leverages their low-bandwidth legacy networks. He pointed out that from a network-longevity standpoint, 4G makes sense – citing AT&T shutting down their 2G network in 2017. Another area where 4G is logical of course is high-bandwidth M2M applications such as remote video monitoring/surveillance.
Expect to hear more from the company about disruptive price points in the IoT space. That is where Altair Semiconductor sees lots of opportunity.